Clico cyber tool shows Czech firms their own vulnerabilities

Eight years ago a headhunter called Vladimír Mlynařčík with an offer to build the Czech branch of the Polish group Clico — at the time he had never even heard of the company. Today he runs a business approaching 800 million crowns in revenue and rolls out tools that leave clients with a genuine “wow effect.”

About a year ago Clico began showing clients its own in-house development, working title Cyber Soldier. The tool vividly demonstrates how attackers break into corporate systems and what methods they use before succeeding and stealing data, and then shows how defensive technologies work — whether or not the company is already using them or merely considering it.

“There isn't a company out there that hasn't leaked some data. Maybe except a washing-machine repairman with a button phone,” jokes Mlynařčík, who has worked in IT for more than a quarter of a century.

Originally the system worked with roughly forty of the most common hacker attack scenarios. Today it has artificial intelligence built in, helping track the rapidly multiplying variations of possible incidents.

The company's other tool, Cyber Threat Intelligence, produces a similar effect — it works as a kind of darknet intelligence service, tracking information about attacks, emerging trends and trade in stolen data. “When we enter a specific company's domain into the system, it shows which of its passwords are already being traded. That could, for instance, be the login credentials of a staff accountant who's still using them. We've seen exactly that,” says Clico's country manager.

Even though deploying the tool costs hundreds of thousands of euros, demand for it is growing in the Czech market too, especially among large companies — it gives them deep insight into their own IT infrastructure and warns of threats based on hacker activity in the region. Cyber Threat Intelligence is already used by one of the major Czech ministries.

Success didn't come overnight: it took about three years to find and train partners capable of deploying the solution for end clients. Mlynařčík is grateful to the parent Polish group — still owned by its three founders, Tomasz Ryś, Janusz Jarosz and Roman Pekutowski — for not demanding instant results and giving him time to develop new business lines.

Thanks to careful preparation and the success of the new technologies, the Czech division's revenue grew by roughly 50% last year, topping 640 million crowns. This year Mlynařčík is counting on a further 30% growth. He admits, though, that the era of year-on-year growth in the hundreds of percent is gradually fading, and the company is shifting to a steadier pace in line with the economy as a whole.

Interestingly, in 2018 the Polish group entered the Czech market not by acquiring an existing company, as it usually does, but by starting from scratch — and the very first employee was Mlynařčík himself, who came from a corporate background with experience at Cisco and IBM.